Semi-apocalyptic Art / Ex-dot-commers make art out of loss

Joyce Slaton, Special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 27, 2001

2001-12-27 04:00:00 PDT San Francisco, California, USA -- Traumatic experiences often feed art -- some of the world's great literature, paintings, films and other works were created in part to reconcile the suffering and agony of war, strife, famine and misery.

Are you surprised, then, that our own tech-industry tragedy is producing artistic ferment and creative works about the suffering?

Of course, it's arguable whether the deposed dot-commers and their ilk are truly suffering -- Victor Hugo or Ernest Hemingway would probably take one look at our ex-millionaires and burst out laughing. But climbing to the heights of your career dizzyingly fast and then being rendered practically unemployable is traumatic, and those who lived it are pouring their frustrated energies into creating works that explore the crash.

Ken Belanger was the CTO for a company called ImageLock, which developed a technology that tracked where companies' logos were being used, helping prevent fraud. Back in 1999 and 2000, ImageLock was riding high, with a roster of big-name clients and an impending IPO that would clearly make its management zillionaires. Of course, you know what happened -- the bottom dropped out of the IPO, ImageLock died a nasty death and investors who'd pumped in millions lost their cash and their shirts.

Instead of blanketing craigslist with his résumé or moving away, Belanger decided to use ImageLock as inspiration. The fruit of that inspiration is a live-action computer game, "PC187: Death of a Dot Commer" -- a nightmarish take on situations Belanger lived every day.

The game follows the investigation of a murder mystery. The CEO of BrandTracker (get it?) is found dead, and the player must sort through a maze of motives, suspects and obfuscation to find the murderer. And, of course, every character in the game has a motive to kill the CEO, from the sharklike VCs to the disgruntled employees. Belanger and a crew of ex-dot-commer friends shot the action over a period of three months in San Francisco, spending $300,000 to get the game on the market.

"No one was killed at ImageLock, but that's about the only real difference between the game and my ex-job," says Belanger with a snigger. He adds that he spotlights the particularly ugly aspects of a dot-com in "PC187": Management bickering, predatory and greedy VCs, sordid affairs, profligate overspending -- it all happened in real life, and Belanger threw it all into the game.

"There's a whole routine in the game where VCs are double-crossing each other and stealing, and that happened," says Belanger. "The abuse of money is definitely real -- at ImageLock we used to take limos everywhere we went. If we were just going down the street for an Association of Internet Professionals meeting, we'd take a limo. I'd go to meetings where people were arguing over who'd get the right to throw us $6 million. Insane."

Clearly. And clearly inspirational for more than one artist. Anthony Clarvoe took audiences into the same surreal place with his play "Ctrl-Alt-Delete," set in the bizarre boom years from 1998 to 2000.

The play follows the fortunes of well-meaning entrepreneur Eddie Fisker, who seeks funding from the powerhouse Prospera Fund to release a wireless connection product called the Gizmo. Before Fisker realizes it, he's helming a startup, complete with scheming investors, an overenthusiastic sales staff and absolutely no plans to start manufacturing Gizmos.

When "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" played San Jose in October, it garnered in-the-know laughter from Valley audiences, and Clarvoe says the play's antics are nothing more than he saw before him.

"I'm not an ex dot-commer myself, but being from the Bay Area, I had plenty of friends who provided examples," says Clarvoe from his home in New York, where "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" is playing in a nearby town. "I kept hearing these responsible people saying that all the rules had been overturned and the new rules would never change. Businesspeople were chucking responsible jobs in great big companies for startups that didn't make anything yet. It was like people throwing down their pens and running to the gold fields."

Clarvoe says the dot-com boom and bust made for a very dramatic setting.

"There have been other bubbles -- tulips, the South Sea bubble, the railway boom," he says. "It's great stuff to build a play on." Clarvoe adds that he hopes the play will run in other towns feeling the effects of the tech bust.

Clarvoe and Belanger have both created works that look back and laugh at the past. But there are still other works that take a good long look at the present, where the laughs are more bitter.

Todd Rosenberg, better known as Odd Todd, is a New York artist whose two-minute Flash animation "Laid Off: A Day in the Life" has netted him some $5,000 in viewers' contributions. It seems many can relate to his main character, a guy who makes meals out of snack foods and suffers from insomnia and a fear of living in a box, and whose most pressing problem is figuring out what to do with all the empty hours.

"People accused me of spying on them," writes Rosenberg via e-mail. "People are grateful because it brings to light the true laid-off lifestyle. You just can't fill a whole day looking for a job, and there's not a lot you can do otherwise when you have no money."

Well, Rosenberg has a little money -- after he put up his virtual tip jar, sympathetic viewers among the 15,000-20,000 daily visitors to his site responded with thousands of dollars in donations, sometimes as much as $100 from one person. It's hardly the salary he was getting from ex-employer Atom Films, but with the tips and his unemployment checks, he'll be able to stay in his overpriced NYC apartment and eat chips a little longer -- at least until the end of February. Then, he says, he'll run off and do something romantic, like become a lobster fisher in Maine, if he can't find a "real" job doing something creative.

"For me, getting laid off was a blessing, as it gave me time to actually focus on a cartoon, which has been difficult, since I've been working in various jobs for the past eight years straight," Rosenberg writes. "Luckily, being single with no real responsibilities, it's easier for me to relax into being laid off. I realize, for people with families and, like, mortgages and stuff, it can't be as laid-back to be laid off."

True. You can smell the palpable desperation of the mortgaged-breadwinner set from a million miles away in the Bay Area these days. And those who have mouths to feed probably aren't writing plays or making animations; they're busy trying to make enough money to survive. But some of their laid-off compadres are using this precious, reflective, crazy time to contemplate what the hell just happened to all of us. And those of us who lived through the dot-com bubble can get a degree of closure, a little catharsis, some symbolic revenge or even just a few knowing laughs from what these people have created.